American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [113]
She appeared in a belted navy blue dress, a single strand of pearls around her neck. Her shoes were pointed and high, her nails a deep claret. She walked in on a cloud of jasmine, handed Georgie her present, dropped into the chair closest to Mother, slipped her dark glasses into her purse, and squeezed the clasp shut with an annunciatory snap.
“You know,” she said in a low voice to Mother, “a woman I know got into a brawl with her husband. He’d been out having drinks with his friends. (Men are like that, Marie. Especially if they have sangre ligera. Especially if they’re people of a certain class, accustomed to light hearts and a certain gregariousness. Even Alexander the Great got a little borracho between the wars.) Well, the woman was unreasonably angry, frustrated with her marriage, fed up hasta aquí. So she threw a plate across the room. You know what happened? It hit him in the head. The next thing she knew, her husband was dead.” Abuelita opened her purse and rummaged around in it. “All because of a few nips,” she added. Unas copitas.
My mother watched the older woman draw out a handkerchief, unfold it, shake it into the air like a frail wing, refold it, and set it on her lap.
“That will not happen to your son,” Mother assured her. “I might throw a dish at a wall if he makes me angry, I might leave him, I might take the children and run away, I might do a million things. But I am not a stupid woman, Rosa. I will not kill him.”
My grandmother looked into her eyes for a very long time, sighed deeply, and shook her head up and down, indicating that she believed her.
Less than a week later—after I forced Margarita to snitch a can of ham from Sandra’s bomb shelter, after a skinny brown Santa Claus ran by sweating in the December heat, after Drosselmeyer tucked a nutcracker under his arm and went to a party, after the Mouse King was chased across stage at the Teatro Municipal, after I waltzed through the starring girl’s dreams in my blue petal costume—Mother proved that what she had told Abuelita was true.
Her arsenal was not pointing at my father. It was pointed away.
It happened like this: Papi stumbled in after an all-night bender with the hombres. Mother took her battle station by the Christmas tree, a flashing, revolving colossus of electrical wizardry he had fashioned from graduated Hula Hoops. At the very moment when porcelain might otherwise fly, she drew back and kicked the thing over. When the twenty-five hoops scattered their red and green across the floor—when the crash-bang clitterclatter had won his undivided attention—she set down her terms. “That’s it, Jorge. I’ve been in your country fourteen long years. No more. I’m going home.”
10
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INDEPENDENCE
Sueños Norteños
IT WASN’T UNTIL I’d been in the United States awhile that I understood how stifling Peru had been for my mother: a closed world, our mundo mesquino, which, as a Peruvian, I thrived in and loved. There were family rules I’d always understood instinctively: Mind tradition, go into business with siblings, give preferential treatment to relatives, stay in the neighborhood, call on your grandparents every Sunday for tea. Eccentrics were forgiven—sword fighters, recluses, extroverts, wayward sons with illegitimate children. But neglect was inexcusable. A wife was supposed to look up to her mother-in-law, seek advice about children, plead for assistance if her man became unruly. Not mark her own turf, as my mother had done.
Crossing to Mother’s side of America, on the other hand, we encountered no family at all. The Clapps, Brooks, Reeds, and Adamses were nowhere to be seen when we flew into Miami that spring of 1959. They were not alerted, and they were not there.